Who the hell knows what is really happening at Gawker, and who the hell cares? Answer: Gawker and Gawker. Which is the interesting thing to me about all of this, the way a story about Gawker has, primarily, been reported on Gawker. And without Gawker leaking internal Gawker memos to Gawker, would we know what’s happening at Gawker? And would we care?

Probably not, and probably not. Which is to say, simply: this is how “the news” is made. Not “reported,” which would imply that it was already news before news-media decided it was, but “made”: news is news because the news says it is. This is why Nick Denton gets points for admitting that his litmus test for a story’s newsworthiness is whether it’s “interesting”: he is interesting in publishing stories, primarily, that he is interested in publishing, and this tautology is the thing itself. How do you know if a thing is newsworthy? Well, if it’s on the news, then it must be news. There can therefore be no question of ever taking down a post, once the editorial collective has decided to put it up, because publishing is a self-fulfilling prophecy: having declared it to be news, it becomes news. This must be what takes the place of “the public interest” for a media organization that does not derive its sense of journalistic ethics from that sense of its social constituency. Gawker is because Gawker is: the purest of pure media, speech as a good absent other considerations. It is Reddit, but so very much better at it.

It’s not surprising, then, that the Gawker “Brand Book” is as wondrously and perfectly vacuous as it is. Here, for example, are all the phrases containing the word “real”:

So what really happened? What we want is the real story. We reveal what’s really happening without restraint, inhibition, or ulterior motives. We tell the real story. What We Do: Get the real story. Media Brands: We tell the real story. We explain what’s really happening. Explain the intricacies of the real story to the people who need to hear them most. Media Platform: We help anyone find the real story. To create and discover the real stories that matter to them. Commitment to surfacing the real story. This is what we ask you to do when finding the real story. To push beyond the surface to reveal the real story and diverse perspectives.

The word “real” is the fetish object whose incantatory rhythm lulls us into blissful submission, into overlooking the fact that the question “What is Gawker for?” could never have an answer. If Gawker had a purpose, it wouldn’t be Gawker. Gawker is for Gawker, world without end, amen, and the end of all our gawking will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. Gawker is as Gawker does, and as it turns out, Gawker sure as hell does.

Short Story Day Africa is a wonderful initiative that was started by the South African novelist Rachel Zadok — author of Gem Squash, Tokoloshe and Sister-Sister – and in the three years of their existence, they’ve already managed to do excellent things. In the last two years, they’ve put out two of the best anthologies of new fiction I’ve read in some time (Feast, Famine & Potluckand Terra Incognita: New Short Speculative Stories from Africa) as well as a lovely looking anthology of young fiction by young people, Rapunzel is Dead, that I just purchased for $0.99 (and so can you). They’re fundraising for their third anthology Water – you can donate here –and I anticipate it will be amazing. Did I mention that you can donate here? You can donate here.

I had a chance to meet Rachel a month ago in Kampala, and interviewed her over email yesterday. A very lightly edited transcript is below.

AB: As you told Bwesigye in March, Short Story Day Africa (SSDA) began with a focus on Southern Africa, “but then decided to expand because writers from the north wanted in.” Could you talk about how that happened?

RZ: We’d always intended the project to develop organically, though how we thought that would happen turned out to be very different to the end result. I guess we didn’t expect the response to the project that it got. I think, when it started, writers on the continent were looking for somewhere to publish their work, work that didn’t necessarily have appeal to a Western publishing industry that pretty much wanted to tell the same stories the media was telling about Africa. Social media was just a couple of years old and it was either get published in the West, or you were pretty much voiceless. In the first year, we just published an extended circle of writers we knew and writers they knew on a website I’d thrown together. We were email based then. The second year we were inundated with requests from writers to send us their stories, and we started the Facebook page. By the third year, writers beyond Southern Africa were asking to be included, so we changed the name, made a new Facebook page and opened it up to any African writer.

The issue then was that the concept of celebrating the short story on the shortest day of the year no longer made any sense, because countries from the above the equator were participating, but we were kind of stuck with that. 21 June still remains the official day to SSDA celebrates short stories, but it always throws a bit of a conundrum at the team because it’s not really what we do anymore. What we do is: publish startling voices telling nuanced stories about Africa and assist them in developing their work. We profile writers and run mini-workshops online. We’re a support platform for African writers and publications featuring African writers.

I guess I mainly just know SSDA from the anthologies! Could you tell me more about the ways you function as a support platform outside of the work you publish?

We run a feature every Wednesday under the hashtag #WriterWednesday in which we interview an African writer and publish the interview on our website blog. Then, throughout the day, we publish links to their work, website etc etc on our social media sites. So basically, our social media for the entire day, from the morning read to the final quote is by that writer.

We link back to the work other online journals are doing via our social media sites, so that they and the writers they publish get more attention. We also publish all their calls for submissions etc, on our social media sites.

On Facebook we run an event every two weeks called #WriterPrompt. It’s for writers to hone their skills and get writing advice. We provide a prompt and they write 200 word flash fiction stories. Everyone who writes is encouraged to comment on the other stories, and the writers edit and work on their skills as one would in any creative writing workshop. Tiah Beautement, a member of our team, runs the events and provides professional support – she’s a published writer but also has a lot of experience running workshops. It works as a mini-workshop, but also a way for writers to showcase their work. At the end of the event, we select one of the stories and run the story and an interview with the writer as the #WriterWednesday feature. It’s a way for emerging/unpublished writers to get a moment in the limelight.

Why do you feel like the South African literary scene has been so insulated from the rest of the continent? And is that changing?

There’s been a whole lot of upheaval in the SA literary scene of late, under headings ‘decolonising literature’ and #litapartheid, which refers to the white dominated publishing industry in South Africa. The weird thing is that, if you speak to South African writers on both sides of the race divide, both feel the other side has the better deal. White South African writers feel they stand very little chance of publication here or abroad, and that publishing houses favour black writers. Black writers feel that their work is of anthropological interest to white audiences, and that the structures of literary festivals and publishing houses capitalize on that.

Both are right to some extent, but I think the real issues are more complex. The readerships for local fiction are pitiful (read Tom Eaton’s scathing but very astute article about publishing in SA for more about that), books are incredibly expensive and everyone is looking at the wrong place to sell their work, i.e. the USA and Europe. No one is looking to the rest of Africa for markets. At least in the offices of the publishing houses, there seems to be this belief that beyond South Africa is a dark continent of illiterate hut dwellers. I asked my publisher to send my last novel to other publishers in other African countries, like Cassava Republic for example, but was told it was pointless, that there was no market.

It’s a total fallacy. But no one here is talking about the vibrant and growing publishing industry on the continent. It’s like shouting into a gale force wind of dissent if you bring it up. I did during a panel at the Franschhoek Literary Festival earlier this year and had people up in arms.

Why were people up in arms?

I’m not really sure why it hit such a nerve. I basically said that writers in South Africa needed to look to Africa as an alternative market, and not keep trying to publish in markets that had little interest in the stories we had to tell, unless they fit into a certain paradigm, and that writers moving off the continent ended up writing about the experience of being African in the diaspora, and that we were limiting the African story by only looking to the west for publication. One publisher said that if Africans were really interested in reading our novels they could buy them off Amazon, and another woman wanted to know why I thought the immigrant experience wasn’t a valid one, which I hadn’t actually said. I don’t think writers here are ready to admit that they’re not going to find an audience in Europe and the USA necessarily.

Why did you decide that the second anthology would be a speculative fiction anthology?

A very practical reason. All the submissions for the first anthology, Feast, Famine & Potluck,were literary fiction. When I asked why no genre writers had submitted work, they said they viewed SSDA as a project for literary writers. We didn’t want that. So we sent out a call for speculative fiction (including every genre under that umbrella, and literary fiction) and placed it the theme of exploring unchartered territory, Terra Incognita.

Since you write speculative fiction, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what seems to me to be a real boom in African writers writing in this category, these days.

I actually write what is considered by publishers to be literary fiction with speculative elements, and by other speculative fiction writers to be spec fic. I don’t know why there needs to be these categories. I find it confusing, unhelpful and divisive to label work in terms that either isolates the readers or makes writers feel insecure about their work. I choose to read work that appeals to me stylistically and has a subject matter I’m interested in. I don’t care if it’s spec fic, historical fiction or literary fiction. Besides which, all fiction is speculative.

I think it would be easy to box the appeal of spec fic for African writers, but I doubt the answer of why is so simple. Maybe and it’s because it lends itself to being able to discuss issues without the risk of landing up in hot water? Maybe, for some writers, it fits the story they’re working on? Maybe it’s just one of those things that becomes popular via osmosis? I think we have to be careful of looking at African spec fic and trying to pin some sort of anthropological reason onto its existence.

What does SSDA bring to the literary landscape that wouldn’t otherwise be there?

An openness to all kinds of stories that you wouldn’t traditionally find in one anthology. We have a reading process that choses readers from a wide range of cultures, and every story is read by three readers who score it. A story that appeals to a reader in Uganda and Botswana sometimes scores low with a reader in South Africa, for example. In a way, the stories are curated by an African readership rather than a single entity. Those stories are then edited by two editors who work closely with the writers over three months to develop the story but also the skills of writer without every imposing voice. It’s intense and it can be trying, but it’s a beautiful thing.

I love the fact that you don’t simply select short stories, but that you work to develop the stories you’ve accepted. [say more about that process? Perhaps a good example/anecdote?]

It’s difficult to give an anecdote without naming the story, but I’ll try. One story scored two 10s (10 out of 10 – yes, it’s like ice-skating our scoring system) from a reader in Botswana and a reader in Nigeria., and 2 from the South African reader. I read the story and found it challenging – honestly I just couldn’t see what they had loved so much to score two perfect 10s – but because it has scored so highly from two of the readers who come from a different narrative sensibility – perhaps a traditional way of telling stories that is lacking my personal history – we went ahead and included it. We then realised that the story needed to be read out loud to be truly appreciated. It’s a beautiful piece of prose poetry that I’ve come to appreciate, but when I first saw it I didn’t get it. If it had been just me curating the anthology, that voice would not have been heard.

Why have you focused specifically on the short story? I ask partly because of the strange way the Caine prize (AKA the “African Booker”) is a prize for short stories, and because it seems like that’s where so much of the action is, these days.

Honestly, there are only three of us in the SSDA team!

Jokes aside, I don’t know why the ‘African Booker’ focused on the short story. A lot of people feel the reason was an insulting one, but I also think perhaps the short story in Africa is like the short story in the USA. People love them. We love to write them and we love to read them. In the UK, short stories are not popular, nor do they sell very well in South Africa. I think the literary scene is just a vibrant and growing one where many forms of literature are appreciated still. Also, people are publishing on the internet quite a lot now, and that lends itself better to short stories than novels.

How is SSDA funded? The anthologies are gorgeous and very high quality. But I’m assuming that sales don’t cover the operating costs?

Well thank you. We do make an effort. Funds come from a variety of sources. Worldreader gives us seed funding every year and that covers the cost of the editing. But he majority comes from crowdfunding. We pre-sell the anthologies before we’ve even selected the stories, and we sell sponsorships.

We’ve been very lucky because the project was designed around the idea of community, as in an African writing and reading community both on the continent and beyond, and people have responded to that. There’s a sense of ownership, that it belongs to the community. So people give in kind as well as cash. Last year Fox & Raven, a small indie publisher, e-formatted the books for us. This year, Electric Book Works is formatting the ebooks.

We still need to raise money to pay the team and the writers, as well as our admin costs, hence the crowdfunding. If you go to the donate page on our website, all the ways people can fund us are listed. http://shortstorydayafrica.org/donate/

Namwali Serpell’s “The Sack” stands on its own, if it must. When I discussed the story with a classroom full of undergraduates—as part of my “Global Contemporary Short Story” class—I think they found it both rewarding and challenging, which is a nice way of saying it was frustrating, but that there can be something nice about being frustrated. There is a certain formal unity to the story, in that the beginning feels like a beginning and the ending feels like an ending—leaving the middle free to feel like itself—and yet, at the same time, that narrative arc does anything but resolve. It ends up where it began, yet inverted, like running your hand along a Möbius strip until you reach the same point (but underneath) and there’s nothing to do but keep going until you get back to the beginning. If you began in the sack, you end up on the outside, or vice versa: if once you saw from the outside, now you see from the inside. But in the very neat and precise machinery of the story’s narrative completion, it un-resolves itself, taking you back to the beginning… only now, you’re inside out, upside down, looking out from looking in. If you turn a sack inside out, you’ll find yourself holding, again, a sack.

Serpell is the rare writer whose earliest fiction is already preceded by a formidable work of literary criticism, the book she published last year called Seven Modes of Uncertainty, but which has been in different stages of preparation for over a decade (it began as the PhD dissertation, she completed in 2008, though the project has grown and evolved quite a bit since then). I found it helpful to read. This is not always the case; many critics make terrible fiction writers, and many fiction writers make the worst critics. In her introduction, in fact, Serpell discusses a broadcasted conversation between Lionel Trilling and Vladimir Nabokov—respectively playing Critic and Author from central casting—and though Trilling was an author and Nabokov was, also, a critic, their conversation produced a symmetrical conflict between the outsider looking in to the work of art and the insider looking out. They saw anything but eye to eye. Or at least they did, in that moment, in that conversation in 1958. Who knows what Nabokov thought of his novel when he wasn’t performing Author? Or what Trilling thought of his own writing, when he was?

Among other things, the point was that critics and writers do not and cannot read the same way, but it’s fine that they don’t, and maybe even necessary that they stay at arm’s length. Perhaps what a critic can say is dependent on what a writer can say, but which the critic cannot, and vice versa? In any case, while Namwali Serpell is one person, her fiction writing and her critical writing are at most and at least adjacent to each other. In the reading below, she describes this adjacency as a conversation which she isn’t party to, like Jekyll scribbling marginalia in Hyde’s books, and said that she makes a point of alternating between academic and creative writing, with as little overlap as possible. There’s something about that suspension that feels exactly right, and I find myself—again—going back to the image of the Möbius strip, the way critical brain and creative brain are on opposite sides of the same single-sided strip.

How should we read “The Sack”? It’s a story that is susceptible to being read as an allegory of reading, if one is so inclined to read it that way: as Lily Kroll observes, the story “calls into question the privilege of readers’ insight” by letting us follow a path that takes us back to where we started. Like so many stories, the opening tempts us to search for meaning, to pick up the pieces, to look for clues, and to discern connections. Who are these people? What is their history together? What is the story behind this story? But if we struggle to see in the story what it is initially hidden—to look in the sack to find what’s inside—we’ll find, looking inside, that we end up inside the sack, ourselves, peering out. What is inside a skin? Which is the inside, which the mask?

It seems likely that one of the two J’s of the story is a white man, for example, and the other a black man. Their names are Jacob and Joseph—there is a third, Naila, the woman who gives their mimetic triangle its second dimension, and a boy who may or may not be a function of a coupling—but the narrative withholds the knowledge of which J is “J” and which J is “the old man.” In the absence of Naila, it doesn’t seem to matter; a two-dimensional triangle reverts to a one dimensional form. By the same token, if one of them is white and one is black—if the old man means something when he says, of J, that “I know what the colour of my skin means to someone of our generation”—it’s hard to find where this withheld fact impacts the narrative, or what recovering it does for our reading of the story. What does it matter? What would it help us to know about their relationship? For a relationship apparently constituted by the phenomenology of race, race turns out to be one-sided, with nothing underneath. In being a story all about race, it finds that race is nothing to be about, all surface, no depth. Like a sack, perhaps? But a sack doesn’t need to be deep to contain oblivion.

If “The Sack” is about reading—if “reading” is what’s inside the sack—then it’s a sack whose outside contains everything else in the world: call the outside of a sack “the inside,” and suddenly it contains the whole world, bounded in nutshell, troubled only by bad dreams. If it’s about race, then it’s about how we struggle to look beneath surfaces that reveal nothing more than new surfaces. As we oscillate between white and black, between J and J, the inadequacy of the only thing we have becomes ever more perilously obvious. And if the story is about gender—and this, too, is what it’s primarily about—then it’s about the inevitable flattening of masculinity into violence when men are deprived of an other to be masculine against, the narcissism of the subject which men use women to blunt and muffle. Or perhaps it’s about something else entirely? Perhaps it definitely is.

I found these things when I looked in this sack, in part, because I dreamed about them and then they came to life. You might dream something different, and find it. You might have no choice but to do so, because you have to choose. As Serpell observes in Seven Modes of Uncertainty, this is where reading cannot escape the problem of ethics: literature produces free choice because the reader must decide what something means,and yet it’s a free choice which the text forces on us. That’s an uncomfortable place to find yourself, as reader, to be forced to take responsibility for what you chose to put in the sack. Passivity can be an alibi for readers who prefer to keep their hands clean, to let the author carry the burden. But what if, instead of playing detective, soothsayer, code-breaker, psychoanalyst—instead of being readers who follow the trail of breadcrumbs as mindlessly as ants—what if we are projecting our dreams forward as we read, living out what we imagined into existence? One retreat from that paradox—that freedom which becomes mandatory as you slide your hand along the Möbius strip and inside turns seamlessly into outside—is to take refuge inside the withheld narrative object, the un-said, to disown responsibility for the dream by finding it in the sack, suspending it there, burying it there, waiting for it there. It’s not in me, you might say, it’s in the sack. But if there is one thing “The Sack” does, it turns out, it’s to insist on turning that sack inside out.

Do you need to read Camus before you read Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation? If you read The Stranger ten years ago, twenty years ago, do you need to re-read it?

I had a Camus phase, in adolescence. I read The Stranger—and even bought L’etranger, with the ambition of using it to improve my French—as well as The Plague, The Fall, and others whose titles I don’t remember. I know that I read them, because while I bought those books new, they looked used when I gave them away. But books I read when I was a teenager didn’t stay in my brain, or at least these haven’t. Of The Stranger, I remember that mother died today, and ennui, and existentialism, I guess. Smoking. Killing an Arab because of the sun. The last time I thought about The Stranger was probably when George Bush reported reading it in Crawford, on vacation, and we all made jokes like “Ah! A book about killing an Arab and not feeling bad about it! Seems legit!”

I remember those jokes much more clearly than I remember the scene in question. I remember the fact that Camus killed an Arab because of the sun, much better than I remember the actual experience of reading the book. I don’t remember the novel as philosophy, or even as novel. Which is to say, the book I read at some point in my teenage years has been thoroughly overwritten in my memory by my sense of why that novel is significant: it’s an exemplary text in the West’s literary erasure of its colonial empire. What I remember about The Stranger is not what it is ostensibly about, but what, in retrospect, it can be seen not to be about. What I remember about The Stranger, primarily, is why I don’t need to re-read it.

Most of the reviews of The Meursault Investigation frame Kamel Daoud’s novel in terms of its retort to the novel Camus is remembered to have written, by the sort of person who is likely to read Kamel Daoud’s novel. I am the sort of person who is likely to read Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, for example, because I’m also the sort of person who has forgotten The Stranger in remembering what Camus erased: Africa. But because I am a reader who is aware that Africa exists, isn’t a book which “critiques” Camus in those terms a little bit superfluous? If my primary reference point for The Stranger is already the critique that is sometimes made of this Algerian-born French writer—the “perverse arrogance” that Achebe once described as Conrad’s choice, in Heart of Darkness, to reduce Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind—then why do I need to read “a bold riposte to Albert Camus’s existential classic,” as the Irish Times calls it? And yet, if I require that critique—if I need to be reminded of the existence of Africa—am I likely to read this novel? I bet I am not likely to read this novel.

I’ve constructed this somewhat elaborate problem not to criticize reviewers for staging Daoud-contre-Camus. I don’t know how else you’d introduce the book, honestly; it’s a novel whose first-person narrator, Harun, literally tells you that he’s speaking back to Camus and correcting his wrong-telling of the past. There is no novel without this framing; the first line of Daoud’s book is a revision of the famous first line of Camus’ novel. And the protagonist of Daoud’s novel has not only read Camus’ novel, but he presumes that you have as well; indeed, the novel is narrated to a journalist in the bar who literally has a copy of The Stranger in his briefcase. Without that context, the book literally makes no sense. But just as Harun conflates Camus and Meursault in his effort to repudiate both—turning a novel into a truth claim, so he can demonstrate that it is a fiction—something important is lost if we do the same thing to Kamel Daoud’s novel. Daoud is not Harun, any more than Camus was Meursault. And the inversion of a fiction is not truth. It’s another fiction.

In her review of The Meursault Investigation, Laila Lalami suggests that “because they offer us a chance to look at the same story with new eyes, literary retellings have always been popular”:

“Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres” reimagines “King Lear” on a farm in Iowa. Tayeb Salih’s “Season of Migration to the North” borrows its structure from Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea” uncovers the story of the madwoman in Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.” But to be successful, a literary retelling must not simply dress up an old story in new clothes. It must also be so convincing and so satisfying that we no longer think of the original story as the truth, but rather come to question it.”

Lalami’s own novel, The Moor’s Account, begins in exactly these terms: its protagonist (the titular “Moor”) has read the account that Cabeza de Vaca gave of the Narvaez expedition, and he writes to supplement and correct it, to tell the real story of what happened. It is fiction, but it opens up the space in which Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative becomes legible as equally fictional, just as creative. When I interviewed her about her book, I felt the need to re-read Cabeza de Vaca; as I read Daoud’s novel, I found myself needing to re-read the novel that Camus wrote in 1942, and I did. Especially when it comes to the imperial fictions that the West has been producing about its others, for centuries, re-telling a canonical story in terms of the consciousness it suppresses does a certain kind of very powerful work.

And yet, and yet, and yet. Why must I read Camus first, in order to read this book? (and if I must read Camus first, why must I read this book?) If reading this book takes me back, inevitably, to the observation that Camus has his limitations, and that’s why I read it, then there’s a tautology nested in the critique of Camus that ends up placing Camus back at the center. Camus remains the original, against which Daoud’s retort or comment or counter or supplement come to seem secondary. It feels like we’ve missed something, and maybe it’s the punchline.

It would do a disservice to Lalami’s own novel, in fact, to think of it only in terms of her imaginative revision of Cabeza de Vaca; the most interesting thing her novel does—if you ask me—is how she plays with the notion of captivity, exploring the forms of un-freedom that derive not from formal enslavement but from exile and deprivation: one can be rendered un-free by solitude and hunger, not only by chains. There is little or no economy in Cabeza de Vaca (and a scrupulous effort not to think about how where we are produces who we are), but Lalami’s effort to sketch out how macro-political waves wash across human societies and transform their fundamental sense of who they are and why is what makes The Moor’s Account vital and interesting.

By the same token, it does a real disservice to this strange and vibrant and conflicted book to think of it as primarily a retort to Camus, and to thereby frame it as a secondary literature. Maybe it’s not a literature at all? Camus is dead, but Literature is still alive today, and what seems most crucial about these kinds of literary re-tellings is that they unsettle the basis on which some stories get privileged over others. There is something radically anti-literary about this novel, in other words, and it seems as crucial to what it’s doing as any reference to Camus.After all, if Camus and his creation seem to blur together, Harun’s treatment of Camus as if he literally was Meursault is so flagrantly and blatantly wrong that it undercuts whatever pretensions this novel might otherwise seem to have to a corrective function. Harun is locked in the past, an this novel is his struggle to emerge. In place of the literary, then, the word “historical” suggests itself to me, if only in reference to the nightmare from which this novel seeks to awake. And it’s a book that would read very differently—and perhaps should—if its primary interlocutor were read to be Fanon instead of Camus.

At the Writivism festival last week, in Kampala, Uganda, a certain conversational form played itself out over and over again: I know you from the internet, it’s so wonderful to finally meet you in person!I spoke variations on that theme to various people, people spoke it to me, and I overheard people speaking it to each other. Many of the guests at Writivism had already met each other, of course—there was a small reunion of some of the Africa39 writers, for example, who had all met at Port Harcourt last year, and many of the guests came with already-assembled cohorts (the Nigerians who came together, the Kenyans who took a bus from Nairobi, etc). But bylines and facebook profiles and author photos travel much faster and farther than bodies do, those sweaty meat-sacks which lag behind struggling to catch up. When you meet people you know but don’t know, recognition is always tempered by the surprise that they are who they turn out to be. They are the person you thought they were, but they are also… more. Sometimes less. And then there’s that disorienting delay while the two parts come into focus, as your brain struggles to process the fact that no, this person is the same person as the person who wrote that. There is a gap, a lagging behind. People are always a little bit too much or a little bit too little.

Is the work of a festival to harmonize those dissonances or to making music out of the cacophony? Maybe those gaps and surpluses are the point. Why else bring a group of Nigerians to Uganda, if not to explore what that ostensibly nominal distinction feels like in practice? “Africa” is one word for one continent, but if pan-Africanism was the thesis, nationalism was the antithesis, the vocabulary through which so much of the festival was articulated. “The Nigerian Literature Conversation.” Or maybe Writivism was the synthesis: Friendships across borders, but also clarity about where those borders still cut deep.

The internet is easy, after all, much too deceptively easy in its borderlessness. I was already facebook friends with many of the people that I met at Writivism, and there’s been a flurry of friending-ing in the days since the festival ended. It’s easy to do that. I’ve since tracked people down on twitter, and been tracked down, belatedly connecting electronically with people who hands I shook, or hugged, or simply poets whose performances were particularlyelectrifying. All you have to do is type and click and it’s done. But at the festival itself, when I would strike up a conversation, I found myself so often unsure whether I had already followed/friended them (and vice-versa); It is good to meet you! I would say (Do I already know you? I was afraid to ask.) Several times I thought I knew someone when I didn’t, or vice versa, and the only way to work through it was to awkwardly be awkward. Facebook makes it easy to know if you are friends with someone, and it’s rarely awkward. You’re rarely exposed.

Festivals are difficult, first and foremost, because of bodies. The primary organizational disaster of this particular festival was having it spread across Kampala, at three different venues separated by hours of snarling traffic. Bodies are the problem, even if we call that problem “traffic.” Too many bodies, and the lag in moving them to where they should go, when they don’t always want to, when they are hungry or tired or hot. There are a lot of bodies in Kampala. It’s a city in desperate need of multi-lane roads—that is, if it is to operate efficiently—and at the present time, it lacks them. (Though China is coming!) As a result, you can spend hours in traffic like it’s nothing, and although motorcycle taxis—here, called “Boda bodas”—are hardly a Ugandan innovation, there are so many of them because of the desperate need to increase the carrying capacity of over-swelled roads. If the traffic is jammed, a boda boda weaves through the gaps and gets your body moving. The price is that it exposes you: your body might be overturned and broken. An absolutely appalling number of people are injured and killed by boda boda accidents, but if you need to get where you need to get in time, you don’t have a lot of options.

In practice, this festival did not move bodies through space with anything like efficiency. And for a start: if there is one way not to organize a festival, it’s to not try to place different events at different parts of the city and then try to shuttle participants between them. You need to let those bodies find their own time and place and their own pace. You need to let them find the pathways and roads and tangents that are most comfortable for them, and to use those perambulatory digressions to find new communities. The last thing you want to do is micromanage movements in a city whose arteries are so sclerotic and unpredictable. You’ll fail, and it will irritate people, especially when they’re hot and hungry and tired and confused. A firm organizational hand goes well with traffic that runs on time; when it doesn’t, you might find that a much looser grip gives people room to breathe. If you push them, they get angry; if you put them on a boda boda, things get dicey. What if they fall off? They are exposed.

“Boda boda,” I’m told, is a name that derives from the word “border,” and from the vehicles which people would use, in the 60’s and 70’s, to cross the Uganda-Kenya border without passing through official border crossings. It was for smuggling, or just for getting around the arbitrary lines that separated people whose lives and communities had always been complexly interrelated, and remained so, no matter what it said on maps. When Uganda and Kenya stopped being “British” in the 1960’s, the East African Community was the structure that was to lead to regional integration, but it didn’t, for lots of reasons. And while it’s a complicated, messy story, the end result was that regional connections were blocked and clotted; bicycle taxis, boda bodas, sprang up as a workaround. People find a way to get where they want to go, no matter where they are supposed to be and stay.

Festivals are notoriously difficult to write about, as an editor told me, when I was offering to write about this one. You can write a description of what happened, calling on names and panels and schedules and quotes, and you can produce a picture of the whole thing that will cohere into some kind of narrative of how it all happened. You can also produce a narrative—stripped of names and details—that will describe how it didn’t happen. I’m sort of delighted by the fact that the same person produced both narratives for the Star, in Nairobi, on the same day: The Writivism Festival 2015: Exploring all things and How to Not Organise a Literary Festival. Are these articles describing the same festival? But of course they are: festivals are difficult to write about because they are always, both, the dissonance and consonance at once, the coming-together and the pulling apart. So maybe you don’t write about them. Maybe you just go, listen, speak, and come back.

(believe it or not, no spoilers for yesterday’s finale, which I haven’t seen)

I’ve been fascinated by the notion that a rape scene should be (or could be) necessary. “Episode six ending was brutal – but was it necessary?” is a common way of framing it; Vanity Fair declared that “Game of Thrones Absolutely Did Not Need to Go There with Sansa Stark,” while over at Slate, the argument is made that “this particular scene was necessary,” given the grim bargain Sansa Stark had struck. Most striking, to me, was Jill Pantozzi (the editor-in-chief of the The Mary Sue) explaining why The Mary Sue would no longer actively promote the show:

“In this particular instance, rape is not necessary to Sansa’s character development (she’s already overcome abusive violence at the hands of men); it is not necessary to establish Ramsay as a bad guy (we already know he is); it is not necessary to prove “how bad things were for women” (Game of Thrones exists in a fictional universe, and we already know it’s exceptionally patriarchal). Rape here, like in all instances, is not a necessary story-driving device.”

The question (and what it presumes) is a lot more revealing than any possible answers. After all, the assertion that a violation should be necessary—that it should be useful or do some kind of narrative work—brings us uncomfortably close to the idea that rape, itself, might sometimes be a “necessary evil.” Representing a violent rape on television and the actual violent act, itself, are distinct, of course; no one would argue the parallel explicitly. Yet both sides of the argument seem to accept, implicitly, that there is a line to be drawn between when a rape scene is acceptable and when it is not. If they disagree about where to draw the line, and where this particular scene falls, there still seems to be general agreement about a general principle: rape is, all things being equal, not a good thing to show on television, but it is sometimes necessary. Sometimes it does work; sometimes the plot calls for it; sometimes, it is a good thing.

There is a larger question being subsumed here. Is violence “necessary”? Was it necessary to kill Ned Stark, Catelyn Stark, Rob Stark, and Talisa Stark and her plus one? Was Joffrey’s killing of Ros necessary? Did they have to kill off Lady, the wolf? The list goes on and on. At a certain point, we are really asking whether Game of Thrones is necessary. And the answer, quite obviously, is that it is not. It is a television show. It is many things, both good, bad, and in-between. But it is not “necessary.”

That we would ask a question like this, putting a television show on (metaphorical) trial for its life, reflects the way pop culture has become a battle-ground on which a variety of other fights are waged. Culture wars are real and consequential: we are talking about whether this show is a good show, yes, but we are also talking and arguing about some of the burning issues of our time, starting with sexual violence. And representations of violence are not, fundamentally, different and distinct from “actual” violence anyway. There is complicity, feedback, and acculturation; how we understand the world through our cultural representations of it helps create the world we live in.

Here is what I think is the real question: what kind of world does Game of Thrones imagine? What does it take to be natural and normal? In its claims to be “realistic,” what sort of reality does it urge us to accept?

First and foremost, Game of Thrones is an essentially sadistic show, and there’s a direct relationship between violence and sympathy. The sympathetic characters are the characters who suffer while the characters who suffer become, as a consequence, sympathetic. We hated Sansa until she began to suffer, for example; now she’s become sympathetic. Characters that we like, who we start to follow and sympathize with and root for, tend, eventually, to suffer and die.

For the first three books of George R. R. Martin’s trilogy, I think, you could argue that this narrative sadism accomplished something. As an entry into the genre, Game of Thrones deflated the mythologies of J.R.R. Tolkien and his many, many imitators, by establishing, over and over again, that “good” characters tend to get killed by the evil and the unscrupulous, because honor and love are, essentially, political liabilities. Nice guys finish last. When the time came to adapt it as an HBO series, it was a brilliant idea to case Sean Bean as Ned Stark, the actor who played Boromir in the Lord of the Rings movies. As a good guy who was corrupted by lust for power—as well as being a usurper who found himself seeking to displace the real king—Boromir’s complexity exposes some of the fairy-tale for what it was, and for the Return of the King to happen, he had to die semi-heroically. Boromir is an important secondary character in the Lord of the Rings, therefore, because his death enables Aragorn to return as King.

In Game of Thrones, on the other hand, there is no real King, and so the Boromir character is forced into the role. But it is clear from the beginning that kingship is just usurpation and violence. Robert Baratheon was a usurper, and so were the people he displaced, in the grand scheme of things; every king was a violent usurper of the person before them. It’s usurpers all the way down, George R. R. Martin declares, and history is written by the winners. Thus, while Ned Stark and his family are obviously the good guys, and the Lannisters are obviously the bad guys, the distinction turns out to mean nothing, or less than nothing. Indeed, good guys finish last because goodness is a liability. When you play the game of thrones, honor is a luxury that you cannot afford.

High fantasy is usually structured around the romance of nobility, of good patriarchs that win in the end, and of princesses that get rescued. King Arthur is the root fantasy of what the “middle ages” were like that organizes this entire set of daydreams: Uther Pendragon’s son will pull the sword from the stone (because he’s the once and future king) and even after King Arthur gets deposed, the myth declares that King Arthur will return to save Britain. Tolkien copied a lot of that, at least for the parts of Middle Earth that don’t center on hobbits, and Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire turns that fantasy on its head: Westeros is structured by dominance, violence, by nice guys getting their heads cut off and women getting raped. It’s incredibly derivative, but A Song of Ice and Fire’s insistence that aristocrats are evil people (and that aristocrats who are not evil people tend not to stay aristocrats for very long) is at least interesting, because it stands Tolkien on his head.

The downfall of House Stark is a pretty good tragedy, then, taking up the three books Martin wrote and published in the 1990’s: A Game of Thrones, 1996; A Clash of Kings, 1998; A Storm of Swords, 2000. The first book is built around the lead-up to Ned Stark’s death; the next two books lead up to the Red Wedding, which kills or scatters all the good guys. It’s tragedy because the end is predetermined: as long as the Starks are who they are—honorable, noble, and just—they are doomed to lose at the game of thrones.

After the first three books, however, something fundamental changed. Classical tragedy is defined by its cathartic end-point, the explosion of violence which reveals the null state of existence to be the nullification of all our devices: watching a great man return to the dust from which he came is to inspire pity and fear, Aristotle wrote, because it is terrible to see it happen to the best of us and also to know that we are next. But tragedy ends—and this is the point—so that we can all go home and go about our lives as normal, as if all of existence isn’t a meaningless horrible blip until we die. Tragedy purges the emotions by confirming the worst, and after we weep, life goes on, because what else can it do?

The Red Wedding should have been the end of the show, I think; it’s the cathartic end-point, and the culmination of the Stark tragedy. We watch, we pity, and we feel fear: we have seen that being good, struggling for justice, for family, and for love, are not compatible with playing the game of thrones. To play the game of thrones, you have to play to win; you have to kill your darlings. If you don’t, you’ll die. The Starks don’t; they die.

But what happens to this story once the Starks are all dead or scattered? Why does the story go on? Tragedies don’t usually continue after the tragic hero is dead, because they cannot, by definition, be tragedies any more. At a certain point, there’s no one left to kill. And Game of Thrones is, after the third book stopped providing source material, no longer a tragedy. The bad guys won, and if life goes on, the good guys don’t come back to life (or, if they do, it’s pretty awful). Ideed, so many of the good guys are dead that the show has no choice but to make bad guys into protagonists (how have Jaime and Cercei Lanister become protagonists, again?)

In the context of romantic high fantasy, the show’s sado-masochistic narrative engine had a moderately subversive purpose. The Starks were nobility who were actually noble, and they embodied the daydream that powers High Fantasy: the romantic belief that Kings and Queens and Princes and Princesses are Good People, that being good and being high not only go together, but do so naturally. By lulling the viewer into a sense of complacent interest in the characters, engaging our sympathetic identification with their struggles, and then killing our darlings, the show plants the seeds of sympathy, allows us to watch them grow, then harvests them. Ned Stark’s death is the point; the Red Wedding is the point; horror and suspense arethe point. Who will die next? No one is safe.

There is something about this experience that we enjoy, for the same reason we like watching horror movies (if we do). There is a certain pleasure in being shocked and hurt. Maybe there’s a purging of the emotions, so we can continue: we watch our greatest fears played out on television, so that we can go on ignoring them in our everyday life. People who are afraid of sexual violence are often drawn to procedural cop shows about sexual violence, for example; if we watch it happen on-screen, we can experience our worst fears in safety. And so forth.

Since this is what people like about the show, why are people suddenly, now, declaring that the show’s violence has gone over the line?

What has changed, I think, is that tragedy has become pornography. Not literal pornography, of course, because very specific forms of gratuitous sexual titillation have been consistent throughout. Put some boobs on screen is one of the boxes each episode needs to check off, and consistently does. But what is the point of evoking terror and pity by hurting characters like Sansa or Cercei? Watching Ned, Catelyn, and Rob die was horrible not only because they were good people, but because we were watching the patriarchal fantasies of Good Kings dying with them. They represented something, the possibility of a return to the way things should be: the tragedy was coming to realize its impossibility. The Starks were the tragic heroes, because, from Ned on down, their heroic qualities were what doomed them, made their deaths inevitable. George R. R. Martin’s innovation was to suggest that “Goodness” is a tragic flaw.

After writing three books in four years, Martin lost the plot; since the Red Wedding, basically, he’s written two books in fifteen years, and they’re a hot mess. He’d written himself into a corner, and it will be interesting to see if HBO can write him out of it. I suspect he’s totally stuck, and here’s why: one way to end the thing would be with the Return of the King (google “R+L=J” if you want to know how it could happen), which would make A Song of Ice and Fire into a tragedy with a happy ending. But a tragedy with a happy ending is not a tragedy, and this is Martin’s dilemma: if the King returns, and all is well that ends well, then we have returned to the narrative that he so devilishly skewered in the first three books. If we watched a nightmarish horror, in which good guys finish last, we’ll wake up to discover that it was all a dream: actually, good guys finish first!

This might be how it ends; tragedy might become fantasy again. I hope not. I hope the White Walkers destroy the Seven Kingdoms and also that the peasants string up all the aristocrats and collectivize agriculture and establish a socialist utopia. That’s my fantasy, different than the one the crypto-royalists seem to cherish. But in the meantime, it’s spectacle without a purpose other than the pleasure of watching it. The show must go on because that’s what television does.

In other words, it is melodramatic pornography. It will have a happy ending, whatever happy means in that context. We will see some kind of visually satisfying spectacle of (dragon) riding and (sword) thrusting and a lot of sound and fury will go into making going-through-the-motions look like it signifies something. We will agonize at the violence and we will thrill to ecstatic thrusts and entanglements and betrayals, but because it happens to characters we barely care about, it will be cheap, easy, and forgettable. We’ll consume it, clean up, and move on. But it will not be necessary, because there will be no purpose to it. And that’s why we’re suddenly knowing it when we see it, as Supreme Court Justice Potter once famously described pornography; nothing is at stake anymore, and nothing can be at stake. The only suspense to be found is an artificially deferred gratification, since we all know where this is going, and it’s fun, but, you know, that’s it.

Pornography is titillation without a purpose, defined by the fact that it isn’t necessary. Whether he admitted it or not, Justice Potter in Jacobellis v. Ohio determined that The Lovers was not pornography, because there was artistic intent (it was a French film in 1958, after all). Game of Thrones was, when it was Tragedy, doing something Artistic-ish. Now it’s just True Detective, a veneer of Artisticish-ness that uses a fairly ludicrous storyline to cover up the fact that it’s not really going anywhere or doing anything. Art gives you permission to watch what would otherwise just be pornography, and we could be titillated by Game of Thrones when we could see that it wasn’t just television, but High Drama on HBO. We could enjoy the trappings of High Fantasy when we could tell ourselves that we were watching it be critiqued and subverted. Now that it isn’t, we’re suddenly feeling a bit icky about watching snuff porn.

]]>http://thenewinquiry.com/features/sunday-reading-111/feed/0What Even Can You Even Say About The Princess-Man of North Sudan?http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/what-even-can-you-even-say-about-the-princess-man-of-north-sudan/
http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/what-even-can-you-even-say-about-the-princess-man-of-north-sudan/#commentsFri, 15 May 2015 12:58:25 +0000http://thenewinquiry.com/?post_type=blogs&p=64065

What is there to say about the “Princess of North Sudan” that isn’t already so incredibly soul-killingly obvious that it feels embarrassingly superfluous to say it? That it’s racist and stupid? Yes, obviously. I mean, are you kidding me? You cannot not be kidding me. You have to be kidding me.

It’s like condemning blackface. If you even have to say it, if you have to articulate the actual words, then are we even having the same conversation? Are we even a “we”? What are we even talking about? It feels insane to even have the conversation. We should be better than this. “We” should recognize that massively encouraging and indulging a child’s childish desire to be a princess by trying to invent a country in Africa is not only terrible, weird parenting—and seriously, good luck to that kid in growing up—but it also represents an absolutely bizarre and oblivious repetition of literally centuries of violent oppression. Man going to great lengths to make his daughter happy is sort of a good look, I guess; white guy showing up in an “unclaimed” part of Africa, with a flag, to start a country and make himself King of it? LESS SO.

So what do you say about such a person? What the hell do you say? Where do you even start?

The only thing more useless than calling it racist and terrible is not calling it racist and terrible, I suppose, which is my way of explaining why I needed to barf up this blog post. And yet the toxic sickness of the cultural imaginary that feeds these fantasies—that makes us hungry for them—is not something you can name and shame, precisely because it’s so normal. We are not better than this, first and foremost, if only because there is no “we.” There is only a repertoire of texts and stories and fantasies that help us imagine who it is that “we” might be, and so many of the white ones, so many of the white senses of the first person plural, are predicated on the exclusion of other senses of we. If whiteness is the desire to produce an us by excluding a them, then of course a white guy with a weakness for arrogant self-delusion is going to set up his daughter as a princess in Africa. It is and he will. But it’s an equally self-congratulatory delusion to imagine that “we” are actually better than this, that “we” are post-racial, that imperialism was a thing that “they” used to believe in, but which “we’ve” put behind us. We have seen the enemy and it’s still us.

As a normative claim, in other words, “we should be better than this” is actually part of the problem, because it only demonstrates the extent to which we aren’t a “we” at all. “We” know that colonialism is over, and “we” understand that a white guy indulging monarchical fantasies on a putatively “blank slate” that he found in Africa is, at best, sort of like planning a safari-themed or plantation-themed wedding and then being defensively pleased with yourself for not actually requiring the waiters to wear blackface. Which happens, constantly, predictably. At best, it represents a level of oblivious self-assertion that reminds you why parent-age white men have been such a problem population for centuries: the amount of arrogant entitlement required to show up in Africa with a flag and declare yourself to be both the new King and also the savior because of Western science or something—on the basis of the fact that no one else has “called it” already, no take-backs—is a toxic brain sickness that has historically correlated with white skin, even if it isn’t a causative genetic link.

Beneath the astounding madness of this guy’s project is the fact that these kinds of imperialist fantasies are so easy to indulge, and that they find such a quick and easy purchase in white minds (which is to say, minds that insist on being white by taking something like this seriously). It tells you something that Disney is not only not better than this, but hired a screenwriter to write the movie who insists that the movie is not about what it is obviously about. But underneath the craziness of this project—a craziness produced by our insistence that it’s SO crazy, that normal people like us would never think this was remotely okay—there is the fact that none of this is actually surprising or crazy. This guy is trying to do what his culture has programmed him to do: he is performing patriarchal whiteness using the convenient props provided by “Africa” as a space of negation. If your heroes are George Washington and Winston Churchill, then this is the sort of thing you are likely to do.

As crazy-making as the existence of this guy and his Indigogo campaign are, Jeremiah Heaton has done us the marvelous favor of demonstrating how crazy-making the history of the last few centuries still is. Jeremy Heaton didn’t set up the borders of Sudan and Egypt so that both countries specifically un-claim the patch of land called Bir Tawil; Jeremy Heaton didn’t draw the borders of these nation-states in schizophrenic contradictions. That was Great Britain that did that, and the United Nations that has, for sixty-odd years (very odd years), insisted on pretending that those arbitrary lines in the sand are somehow sacred. In a world where nearly every African nation is stuck with the absolutely arbitrary and nonsensical fantasy-borders imposed on them, by white men a century ago, normality is already thoroughly defined by the leftover remnants of Jeremy Heaton’s predecessors. And it’s crazy-making!

In such a world, nothing is so unsurprising and unremarkable as a white man playing King of Africa through his daughter, nor the fact that Disney would take a look at this story and see their kind of story being told. Where do you think this seven-year old girl got the idea that she should want to be a princess? Americans love saying that we are an anti-monarchical country almost as much as we love pretending to be kings and princesses. We just don’t do it here. After all, where, in a Democracy, can you be a princess? Where can real patriarchal power be indulged? Only in pantomime and play. Only in pretend. Only in the past. Only out there. Space solves the problem of time: outside of our Democracy, “out there” in mythical places like Africa and the Orient, you can pretend to be doing it for real, because and to the extent that you can pretend those places are not actually real places, or are lodged in a time before modernity. They can become blank slates for white imagination, white fantasy, because and to the extent that you can imagine that no one lives there, or if they do, that they’re not like us (and need help becoming like us). Because and if they are imaginary—mere images—you can imagine that you are real, that you are really living up to your image of what you really are. This is what Jeremy Heaton has been programmed by his toxic culture to imagine he and his daughter should do.

Put simply, what makes a story like this so unsurprising—and how inevitable it is that the old imperial geographies will get used, in the present, to project fantasies of domination that might otherwise be awkward for American white people to indulge in America“Awkward” in a sort of do it but don’t talk about it way.—are the expectations for personhood that are baked into normative whiteness, a rancid calzone of aristocratic desires that children are fed from the moment they’re old enough to understand. After all, why wouldn’t a (white) child want to be a princess? Why wouldn’t she expect that this is a thing to aspire to be? And why wouldn’t a (white) father feel the need to give this to her? “This” being an aristocratic privilege of command and a bloodline-based superiority; “this” being the expectation that patriarchal love be expressed by leaving a despotism to your child. If these are things we teach children to want, things we have taught ourselves to expect, it’s because we never really reconstructed this racist country; a Georgia-born Virginian like Jeremy Heaton can unashamedly parade his desire to own an Africa, so that his daughter can inherit an Africa, because we live in a crazy-making racist country that insists Democracy and Chattel slavery were ever, in some sense, compatible. That’s what happens when your Declaration of Independence was written by a slave owner, and that’s what happened when we pretended the whole thing wasn’t therefore totally delegitmized.

That was tragedy, though; this is farce. For centuries, the global economy was built on the violently expropriated labor, land, and lives of non-white people, in very clear and direct and brutal and vicious ways. It was not subtle. White people owned black people and Africa, not because it made any sense, but because those white people would shoot you if you disagreed with them, and they did, a lot. The human tragedy produced by this violence for centuries is vastly beyond human comprehension. But then, we also try really hard not to comprehend it, we white people who think white is an okay thing to be; we close the book on it and insist on moving on, looking forward, not back. Mistakes were made by those white people, but we white people are different white people. That’s why Jeremy Heaton can come along with a hilariously literal-mindedness and imagine that repeating the past is a thing that’s not crazy. Because what is he doing but playing out the childish fantasies that his honored predecessors played out, and are still honored for playing? If you refuse to acknowledge the tragedy, you will make yourself a farce. White people who think that “white people” is an identity you can inhabit without being defined by centuries of violence—who bristle at words like “privilege” because it makes whiteness tangible and visible—are a joke without a punch line, just a punch in the mouth if you laugh.

And yet: Jeremy Heaton is more a scandal than a threat. He’s just a guy with delusions and enough money to play them out. Disney is another story, but for different reasons; they have a lot more money, but they confie themselves to the cultural realm, which is a different category of damage. But ultimately, there’s a limited amount of damage that this buffoon can do. Historically, when a white guy with a flag showed up somewhere at a place and called it “terra nullius,” the problem was that he tended, thereafter, to systematically kill everybody who lived there. Terra Nullius was a euphemism for genocide, historically, because calling the land “uninhabited” was a way to pretend you hadn’t just murdered that lie into coming true. But Jeremy Heaton came along at the wrong time to become a genocidaire; like so many clueless white buffoons, he’s much more likely to get used by Egypt and Sudan than he is to cause any real damage. His project is a clusterfuck, but he’s just a tourist with a case of bad nostalgia. He’s not going to shoot people.

Other people are, however. Farce follows tragedy because violence does not leave the world unchanged. There is no more slavery and no more colonialism; today’s rapaciously exploitative capitalism takes different forms. But while those who insist on mindlessly repeating the past make themselves into a spectacle, unconscious self-parody—and Jeremy Heaton has been almost uniformly mocked because this is not the sort of thing we do anymore—the fact that he is a spectacle is also because the capitalist world has found much more efficient and boring ways of expropriating labor, land, and lives. His are unfashionable, like blackface: the modern world has new and improved methods of dehumanizing and exploiting black people.

Put simply, Jeremy Heaton is an anachronism because if you want to make a lot of money by throwing Africans off their land or exploiting their very cheap labor, all you have to do is cut a deal with their governments, who do the hard work of murder and discipline themselves. This point needs to be underscored, because it’s not unrelated to global white supremacy, but it’s not the same, either: Africans being pushed off their land by agro-business (or being put to work on land which is no longer theirs) is as likely to be done at the behest of Saudi capital or Chinese, and the hand holding the gun and giving the order is likely to be black (though there’s always a white man in there somewhere, getting his cut). But Bir Tawil is a sideshow compared to the land expropriations and violent exploitation of routine global capitalism. The big land-grabs that have been accelerating, since about 2008, are utterly normal, utterly unspectacular, business as usual, and they’re so enormous that something like Heaton’s little project is just a hilarious little joke. Millions of hectares being sold are today’s economic tragedy (or one of them, rather), but the mismatch in scale is staggering. I won’t summarize this Oxfam report, because you can pick a page and see for yourself; or click a few of these links, taken from the Stop Africa Land Grab website:

We white people can and should be humiliated by the fact that Jeremy Heaton is able to get as much play out of this lunacy as he is, because he’s reminding us of what it means to be white, wtill. He’s playing by the rules of a game we haven’t repudiated, even if we might sometimes flatter ourselves that we have. But white-guy-with-a-flag-and-a-dream is an old game, one that might occasionally experience a revival, but one which isn’t coming back. Jeremy Heaton is toxic backwash from a cultural imaginary that hasn’t purged itself of the poison. But he’s only as dangerous as a Disney movie, not armed with a gun. And other people are, people who don’t need to crowd-source their dreams of empire.